Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode: Readings and Roundtable Discussion

Sawako Nakayasu is an artist working with language, performance, and translation—separately and in various combinations. Her books include The Ants (Les Figues Press), Texture Notes (Letter Machine Editions), the translation of Tatsumi Hijikata’s Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls (UDP), The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Canarium Books), and Mouth: Eats Color – Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations, & Originals (Rogue Factorial), a multilingual work of both original and translated poetry.

Mónica de la Torre’s books include Repetition Nineteen (Nightboat) and The Happy End/All Welcome (UDP), as well as Public Domain, Talk Shows, and two books in Spanish, Acúfenos and Sociedad Anónima. She is the translator of Defense of the Idol (UDP) by Chilean modernist Omar Cáceres, and co-editor of Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (Copper Canyon Press), and is a member of the editorial board of the Señal series at Ugly Duckling Presse. Born and raised in Mexico City, she has lived in New York City since the 1990s. She is a contributing editor to BOMB Magazine where she previously worked as a Senior Editor, and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College.

Mirene Arsanios is the author of the short story collection, The City Outside the Sentence (Ashkal Alwan). She has contributed essays and short stories to e-flux journal, Vida, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among others. Arsanios co-founded the collective 98weeks Research Project in Beirut and is the founding editor of Makhzin, a bilingual English/Arabic magazine for innovative writing. She teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts at Bard College. Arsanios currently lives in New York where she was a 2016 LMCC Workspace fellow, and an ART OMI resident in fall 2017. With Rachel Valinsky, she coordinated the Friday night reading series at the Poetry Project from 2017-19. Her book, The Autobiography of a Language, is forthcoming from Futurepoem.

Esther Allen’s translation of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Zama received the 2017 National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association. With support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, she then translated the other two volumes in Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, The Silentiary (2022) and The Suicides (2025). A professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and Baruch College, Allen was named a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres by the French government, and her essays and translations have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation website, the Paris Review, Words Without Borders, and other publications.